Kurt and Abel at the head of the ladder hesitated for a moment,
and then plunged backward into the pit. 'If we don't kill them,'
said one of the sharpshooters, 'they'll blow us to rags. They've
gone down that hatchway. Come!…
'Here they are. Hands up! I say. Hold your light while I
shoot…'
Section 8
It was still quite dark when his valet and Firmin came together
and told the ex-king Egbert that the business was settled.
He started up into a sitting position on the side of his bed.
'Did he go out?' asked the ex-king.
'He is dead,' said Firmin. 'He was shot.'
The ex-king reflected. 'That's about the best thing that could
have happened,' he said. 'Where are the bombs? In that
farm-house on the opposite hill-side! Why! the place is in sight!
Let us go. I'll dress. Is there any one in the place, Firmin, to
get us a cup of coffee?'
Through the hungry twilight of the dawn the ex-king's automobile
carried him to the farm-house where the last rebel king was lying
among his bombs. The rim of the sky flashed, the east grew
bright, and the sun was just rising over the hills when King
Egbert reached the farm-yard. There he found the hay lorries
drawn out from the barn with the dreadful bombs still packed upon
them. A couple of score of aviators held the yard, and outside a
few peasants stood in a little group and stared, ignorant as yet
of what had happened. Against the stone wall of the farm-yard
five bodies were lying neatly side by side, and Pestovitch had an
expression of surprise on his face and the king was chiefly
identifiable by his long white hands and his blonde moustache.
The wounded aeronaut had been carried down to the inn. And after
the ex-king had given directions in what manner the bombs were to
be taken to the new special laboratories above Zurich, where they
could be unpacked in an atmosphere of chlorine, he turned to
these five still shapes.
Their five pairs of feet stuck out with a curious stiff
unanimity…
'What else was there to do?' he said in answer to some internal
protest.
'I wonder, Firmin, if there are any more of them?'
'Bombs, sir?' asked Firmin.
'No, such kings…
'The pitiful folly of it!' said the ex-king, following his
thoughts. 'Firmin,' as an ex-professor of International Politics,
I think it falls to you to bury them. There?… No, don't put
them near the well. People will have to drink from that well.
Bury them over there, some way off in the field.'
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE NEW PHASE
Section 1
The task that lay before the Assembly of Brissago, viewed as we
may view it now from the clarifying standpoint of things
accomplished, was in its broad issues a simple one. Essentially
it was to place social organisation upon the new footing that the
swift, accelerated advance of human knowledge had rendered
necessary. The council was gathered together with the haste of a
salvage expedition, and it was confronted with wreckage; but the
wreckage was irreparable wreckage, and the only possibilities of
the case were either the relapse of mankind to the agricultural
barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully or the
acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social
order. The old tendencies of human nature, suspicion, jealousy,
particularism, and belligerency, were incompatible with the
monstrous destructive power of the new appliances the inhuman
logic of science had produced. The equilibrium could be restored
only by civilisation destroying itself down to a level at which
modern apparatus could no longer be produced, or by human nature
adapting itself in its institutions to the new conditions. It was
for the latter alternative that the assembly existed.
Sooner or later this choice would have confronted mankind. The
sudden development of atomic science did but precipitate and
render rapid and dramatic a clash between the new and the
customary that had been gathering since ever the first flint was
chipped or the first fire built together. From the day when man
contrived himself a tool and suffered another male to draw near
him, he ceased to be altogether a thing of instinct and
untroubled convictions. From that day forth a widening breach can
be traced between his egotistical passions and the social need.
Slowly he adapted himself to the life of the homestead, and his
passionate impulses widened out to the demands of the clan and
the tribe. But widen though his impulses might, the latent hunter
and wanderer and wonderer in his imagination outstripped their
development. He was never quite subdued to the soil nor quite
tamed to the home. Everywhere it needed teaching and the priest
to keep him within the bounds of the plough-life and the
beast-tending. Slowly a vast system of traditional imperatives
superposed itself upon his instincts, imperatives that were
admirably fitted to make him that cultivator, that cattle-mincer,
who was for twice ten thousand years the normal man.
And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his
tilling came civilisation. Civilisation was the agricultural
surplus. It appeared as trade and tracks and roads, it pushed
boats out upon the rivers and presently invaded the seas, and
within its primitive courts, within temples grown rich and
leisurely and amidst the gathering medley of the seaport towns
rose speculation and philosophy and science, and the beginning of
the new order that has at last established itself as human life.
Slowly at first, as we traced it, and then with an accumulating
velocity, the new powers were fabricated. Man as a whole did not
seek them nor desire them; they were thrust into his hand. For a
time men took up and used these new things and the new powers
inadvertently as they came to him, recking nothing of the
consequences. For endless generations change led him very
gently. But when he had been led far enough, change quickened the
pace. It was with a series of shocks that he realised at last
that he was living the old life less and less and a new life more
and more.
Already before the release of atomic energy the tensions between
the old way of living and the new were intense. They were far